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How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes. This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International. tion.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

About the Author

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Greg Wilson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, and has worked on high-performance scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security. He is the author of Data Crunching and Practical Parallel Programming (MIT Press, 1995), and is a contributing editor at Doctor Dobb's Journal, and an adjunct professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

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This is an interesting book. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I certainly do not find all of the code featured in this book to be beautiful, but there is a lot of variety in the case studies which make up each chapter, and I think there is something for everyone here - as long as you have a reasonable amount of programming experience.

If anything, this book is proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To my eye this collection is hit-or-miss. Several of the contributions are indeed beautiful while others are mundane and uninteresting. This could be a beautiful book but, alas, it misses the mark.

I am a software engineer of about 5 years of professional experience. The book is attractive to me because it describes proven best-practices for existing software. There are a large variety of software descriptions in this book. If you are looking for a programming-language-specific book, this book might not be for you, because it contains a wide variety of projects from different programming languages (from Fortran to Python and perl).

For the intermediate or beginning programmer, I'd say this is an excellent read as long as you are able to comprehend the material. Some of the text demands more than a cursory knowledge of programming. I will probably need to reread a few chapters later in my career in order to understand them in the manner they were intended.

The book reads like a book about software pattern implementations, but without the emphasis on the patterns. It is left to the reader to draw generalizations from the examples that they can apply to their own code.

Personally, I'd like to see more books like this. It provides a good frame of reference for the construction of good software.

Enjoyed the book a lot. Not only contains really good solutions to a wide variety of problems: the core of the book are the explanations from the authors of each piece of beautiful code and why they think it is beautiful.

The better part is that each section is short enough to be read in one shot. Helps a lot on following the authors!

This book is remarkably bad, not because it's a boring book about programming from which you'll learn absolutely nothing. (That's not remarkable.) It's because it claims to be a book about beautiful code that will help you to make the same. Forget it.

First off, there isn't any beautiful code in this book as far as I can see (and I'm looking from the perspective of 25 years in this game). The first chapter is about regular expressions, which are about as beautiful as a root canal.

As another reviewer pointed out, the writing is terrible, too. Each chapter is like the programmer's eulogy to himself. He'll recount his great achievements and tell us how much he liked puppy dogs and sunshine -- or Haskell and Scheme, or whatever he personally likes. How any of this is supposed to be relevant to your job as a programmer is beyond me.

One chapter opens with a line of arcane Scheme code and the suggestion that, if you don't understand it, maybe you should just "read the first few chapters of the Scheme manual." What a jerk! Another author suggests that we should wade through all the intricacies of the Solaris operating system's process control scheme so that he has enough background material to describe a bug. Really? This is beautiful code? I think not.

If you want to feel superior to other programmers... If you want to sleep well knowing that *your* code must surely be more beautiful than anything these windbags have thrown out, then this is a great book! Otherwise, a basic college course in program organization and debugging would be of much greater help.

Real beautiful code must meet two objectives: First, the program must run correctly and be easy to work with in the users' eyes (not just the programmer's). Second, the program must be easy to debug because 75% of development time and effort goes into debugging, not writing new algorithms. These are primary axioms in quality software development, yet they're never mentioned in this book, which is full of puffery and pride for the developers' own code that looks "beautiful" to them.